awe, humility, hope and a few other things I might notice

Tag Archives: daily prompt

Daily Prompt: It’s 2AM and your phone has just buzzed you awake, filling the room in white-blue LED light. You have a message. It’s a photo. No words, no explanation. Just a photo. Tell us all about it. And what happens next.

Kate is trembling in her due diligence. Reviewing every broker known to humanity she is near a jittery collapse. She just spent the past 5 hours searching in the blinding over bright white screens and boldface Arial fonts, slick black backgrounds and neon highlighted type which lead her into the need to find out what all those acronyms mean. Then she went down those paths to find out why she would want ETFs or a USD RRSP and why would she bother with a VB for a simple TFSA. Gosh, who does that! Then when she checked the reviews she was compelled to investigate the reviewers, so many seem biased. So is QT ‘on the QT’ with the G&M? That would knock the foundation out from underneath their analysis, and much of hers as well. Before it got any more complicated maybe she should just ask some questions. Ahh, that involves passwords and id logins and more stenography than a grand jury case. They learn more about her from the security questions than the actual securities brokers ever will. Who is alive out there? At this hour? It could be days before anyone responded, if they even found her question interesting enough to respond at all. What does it take? 247 reads and no replies since last week? What kind of place is this?

She picks at the dry skin on her heels, tears off almost too much. Decades ago she read that dust is mostly dry skin. She believes it now, tearing at smaller pieces, scrubbing and scratching them unconsciously with her short fingernails. It was about to break into a riot, completely overwhelming her. Her phone rings. It’s a real telephone ring, “BRRRRRNG BRRRRRNG BRRRRRRNG”. She loves that with all the silent or single toned IMing, vibrational numbing and even Skype’s comforting “Shhhhhhrrrm bop” she can still find someone in virtual reality who felt that a real telephone ring was worth resurrecting into a sound file. Kate picks up the phone. It’s a picture file, no message. She puts the phone down, goes to the washroom, washes her face and her feet in warm water then gets into bed and goes to sleep. His smile always has that power over her. He will be another day late. It can wait.

I know Earth is in the Goldilocks Zone. The Goldilocks zone in astronomy refers to planets which rotate neither too far nor too near their sun or suns and have the potential to maintain liquid water. It is also known as a habitable zone, which serves my purpose here much better. I disagree with such limitations on the possibility for life, we have so many amazing creatures on Earth that live in very un-habitable zones that I prefer to think with a more open mind on matters of exo-biology. However, for my husband and myself we are looking for a much more narrowly defined ideal Goldilocks zone for us here on Earth. Sometimes it seems we could move anywhere, adapt to many, even some extreme, conditions. I think sub-zero temperatures rather fascinating and he has lived through monsoons, yet these were seasons and had beginnings and endings. For me at least, even the delicate dance of light snow in February or the soft glow of San Diego 75-degree sun can turn into tyranny when they go uninterrupted for days or weeks at a time. To make matters more complicated, my husband and I enjoy different extremes. He is as wary of temperatures below 10 Celsius as I am of temperatures with humidity above 80 Fahrenheit. He does not share my love of snow and I am concerned about living in the cloud forests where the sun is a far away friend that doesn’t visit very often. Poetic as they are, I can’t imagine the burden of having clouds overhead all the time. I think I might start to develop a hunchback. Also, my green thumb wrinkles with consternation at the thought; “how could I grow sunflowers or tomatoes with 250 days of overcast skies?” My husband might argue, “How can you grow anything with only 8 weeks of summer?” “Well, cold frames and greenhouses and big sunny windows can help a lot,” I would contest. No winning that argument, it looks like Virginia and Vancouver, despite the fog and countless days of looming clouds are on our short list of habitable places. Maybe I could develop a romantic love for mist.

Place is not only about topography and temperature, but about work and housing compatibility too. We want to live near friends and or family. Unfortunately when we asked ourselves if our friends or families live anywhere we want to live, the answer was mostly… “Nah”. That combination of desirable living, limited commuting, low’ish’ cost of housing and well-paid working just doesn’t seem to align within reasonable distance to friends in too many places under this sun. Also, there are issues of ambiance, not only atmosphere to struggle with. I did research some years ago about signing on to work in the Antarctic for six months. I would have done it too, but I just thought the drinking or smoking and machismo of even 1 other staff person in such a small community might drive me crazy, far more crazy than the cold or the lack of sun or even lack of contact with friends and family. I have much greater fear of the constant presence of a jerk than of the occasional tornado, the regularity of plummeting mercury or the silence of a lonely place. Also, last year we did some shopping in part of the sprawl that I will call Torontopolis. We went into a store where there was a minor holiday weekend sale and it looked more like planes had dumped clothes from a cargo bay than what was supposed to be a retail store. The shoppers were stepping on the clothes and I wondered if soon they would be stepping on each other in their blithe rejection of common courtesy. We are considering a move into that vicinity and I want to be far enough away from that mentality that I might forget the whole incident some day. Maybe if there are some hills in between us, I could hope for mountains but then it would get too cold for hubby. I do love mountains and at the very least need lots of trails and paths that are not blocked by short mazes of subdivisions, dead end industrial parking lots or impassable highway overpasses. It’s enough to create labyrinths in the mind.

So where is our Goldilocks zone on Earth? Somewhere not too cold, not too humid, not too conservative, not too much anarchy, not too close to a city, not too far from an organic grocer, not too monolingual that it lacks diversity, not so much individualism that it lacks community. And not too far from people we can call our good friends but far enough that we will need to make some high quality new ones.